All ministers of transport tend to sound alike, but the cast in Ben
Elton’s novel, Gridlock, has a curious ring. Sam Turk, head of Global Motors,
is Parkhurst’s comrade-in-politics and leader of the dastardly road lobby.
Ingmar Bresslaw, is the power behind the throne, the source of the off-the-record
briefings from No 10. Of course, any resemblance between these fictitious
characters and any one living or dead (even from the neck up) is purely
coincidental.

The grey men of the road lobby are not the most obvious stuff of literature.
Elton describes them thus: ‘A shadowy, unofficial alliance, difficult to
define, but none the less one of the most powerful groups of people in the
country. These people wanted one thing out of life, and one thing only –
they wanted more roads.’

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Gridlock is a political thriller. On one side is the spastic scientist
who has invented a cheap hydrogen engine, which he is insisting should be
used only for public transport. He is allied with Debbie, who is in a wheelchair
because she was crippled by one of Global Motors’s more popular products,
when in the hands of a salesman overtaking a car which had stopped at a
pelican crossing. The third member of this team is Debbie’s black lodger,
a traffic warden.

On the other side is Parkhurst with his secret £15 billion road
building plans and Turk, who is in the middle of relaunching the Debbie-crippler
as the Global Crappee. Parkhurst finds out about the hydrogen engine and
tells Turk, who organises a break-in at the Patent Office and steals the
plans. He hires a hit squad to eliminate the scientist. I have no intention
of revealing the twists and turns of the rest of the plot but Elton’s climax
is a particularly neat twist.

Ever since the Keystone cops, car chases have been a cliche. Elton sees
it thus: ‘All week people sit in traffic jams . . . Then they sit in a drab
cinema and watch a man drive a car through rush-hour traffic, clear across
a city at 80 miles per hour. If the man turned into a 6-foot banana we would
say it was a stupid movie.’ Instead we ‘remark how brilliantly done the
car chases were’.

Gridlock too ends with a chase – but this time the setting is a vast
traffic jam, the gridlock of the novel’s title, in which the whole of mechanised
life as we know it has ground to halt, and the chase is down to a contest
between the beer gut and the woman in the wheelchair.

The cardboard cutout characters have their point. For the novel has
a political message. Turk is about greed. Parkhurst is about vanity and
toadying. And these are the selfish people who determine transport policy
– and ensure a steady supply of cripples like Debbie.

Gridlock has shrewd social insights. From outer space, the producer
of a television programme on another planet describes earthly transport
policy: ‘You’re trying to tell me that they’re all going in the same direction,
travelling to much the same destinations and yet they’re all deliberately
impeding the progress of each other by covering 6 square metres of space
with a large, almost completely empty tin box?’

As you might expect from one of Britain’s better comedians, the book
is stuffed with funny lines and the plot is more gripping than any tyre
advertisement. It is a welcome antidote to all the car adverts.